An Old Model for Success

Keith Ryan,
An Old Model for Success - Insights Magazine in association with IBM
, Nov-05

There's a memorable passage in The Living Company, by Arie de Geus: "When I entered my first place of work [in the fifties]... I felt a slight level of discomfort. The theories back at business school had mentioned labour, but there had been no talk of people. Yet the real world... seemed to be full of them. And because the workplace was full of people, it looked suspiciously as if companies were not always rational, calculable and controllable."

Birth of the living company

Morgan Witzel,
Birth of the Living Company - Financial Times
, 21-Aug-03

Arie de Geus is best known for his role in the development of the concept of the "learning organisation". He has also produced a series of works on organisation that take a holistic view of companies and their environment. A working manager who only turned to academia late in his career, he combines pragmatism with high theory. His statement that in the future a company's only sustainable advantage may be its ability to learn became a business mantra of the 1990s ...

Secrets of the Hot Seat

Simon London,
How to Run a Company - Secrets of the Hot Seat - Financial Times Business Book Review
, 20-Nov-03

Business books fall into two main categories. By far the largest is written by academics and consultants, people who tend to be long on theory but short on real-world management experience. Less frequent are memoirs and "how to" guides written by career managers, in which anecdote too often substitutes for insight. There are, however, notable exceptions to the memoir rule. Books such as Alfred Sloan's My Years at General Motors (1963) and The Living Company (1997) by Arie de Geus, former Shell manager, demonstrate that some multi-talented managers can cross the divide